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"The show must go on" – yet I don't have a vision of "a future art". I think there is no "future art". I think the best we can get is an art of the present.
The words "vision" and "future" seem to me somehow academic and overly optimistic, better fitting a different kind of question for this moment: will there be future terror? Unfortunately, yes, because the politics of injustice and arrogance will continue and nurture even more desperate acts of photogenic destruction for large, shocked audiences. Terror is most likely to trigger the false responses that create even more mediatized terror for even more terrified spectators/audiences. At the World Trade Center, the attacks were broadcast live without even any announcements.
What should I answer to your question about art? I don't know. I don't even want to think about that which keeps the bubble going. But I know one thing for sure: I definitely don't want to link art to terrorism, even though these kind of radical flirtation are part of art history and theory. The composer Stockhausen unfortunately was plain stupid when he somehow compared the World Trade Center terrorists to artists, imagining these fanatics and their preparations, lethal consequences and their effects. This inappropriate statement got him some non-anticipated effects his music performances wouldn't have been able to cause: the world press, plus an immediate stop to his public performances.
The Nineties are over. Cynical ironies and strategic stupidity are dated now. So-called popular culture will be revisited and defined differently. Art will not cease to be a loser business, an embarrassing reminder of how limited and fragile people are. Art will not stop existing, even when confronted with consumerism, bad politics or terrorism. I just hope that art will never turn fanatic and over-determined by "visions" and some kind of a "future".
Let's look a bit on some vocabulary: war is – after Clausewitz – the continuation of politics with other means. Terrorists have no politics, no "polis" they represent. It is the aggressiveness of the impact with which they try to catch a population to believe that they represent them. Starting a war, bombing some country, leading a "crusade" (Bush) against Islam or writing about "clashes of cultures" can help terrorists to fulfill their politics and get their polis, the population which they would like to represent and radicalize. With terrorism, a "vision" is at work and works in most cases.
Should art represent a population and have a vision? Should it be equal to politics and should it line up on battle fronts? Many intellectuals and artists volunteered for World War I. Many of them also cheered the Golf War of 1991, that war we could call today ”Bush War I”. It helped to create a new generation of terrorists hitting now. In these days I receive, even from well known artists and critics, emails asking for strong actions and anti-democratic solutions. I guess by doing so they are not making art. But they do so as artists. These "folks" do so as regular TV audiences, as radio listeners, as informed, home-made newspaper trained experts on ”terrorism”, "Islam", the "Arab world" and "war". They have a "vision". How can’t they, if the majority of news outlets are repeating the same wisdom of revenge and hit-back, over and over again. How can artists not be representatives of a certain kind of "homeland defense" and part of a larger effort to shore up moral strength and total unity behind a strong symbolic man and prepare for future casualties, so-called price for freedom? If the current administration and mainstream media continue to ban critical opinions, I will soon not even be able to tell anymore that I feel utterly disgusted by all this war reasoning and war preparations. If truth is the first casualty of war, then they are right, they are at war. I try not to be at war. I try to be on my carpet, my computer, in my studio. I even try to do art – whatever that means, without a "vision", without a "future".
I am usually looked at as an artist when it comes to this kind of invitations to write about art. But I also lie every morning for hours on the floor reading newspapers and books: getting a bit frustrated, angry and sad about certain types of globalized injustice. Does making art help me? Does it help anybody else? May be, probably; it depends, it could be worse, it could be better, not at all, for sure, whatever. Have I made some art today? Have I been hit by a vision already? No, just some tea, some reports, some emails and a general unpleasant feeling of doing nothing.
Terrorists also read newspapers, I suppose, and turn, at one point, fanatical, i. e. terrorists. Some of the terrorists were studying in Hamburg. One of them finished his master thesis on urbanism. I assume he could handle the three letters for ‘art’, or the five for ‘Kunst’. It didn't help to prevent him from his actions. I was in Hamburg for an exhibition (www.lueneburger-heide-sprechen.de) just a couple of days before this catastrophic event took stage. I flew back to New York around the same time as some of these terrorists came to New York. We were presented in-flight videos showing New York City with the World Trade Center. They might have preferred the Pakistan Airline flight video with a prayer, introduced in the early 1990s to the flight service. That’s the stereotype. The more one looks at terrorism, the more it looks like daily life with a sick ending. But there isn't just a sick ending. There is also a fatal build-up, a kind of radicalization with multiple complex origins that can't be explained as "fanaticism", racist perceptions of Islam or expressed in the theological and pathological language of evil and insanity. It is very easy to follow this track of stereotypical thinking. And it is dangerous, more dangerous then art ever can be. Alienating a big part of the world and demonizing a world religion (and which religion hasn't been used for a pretext to kill people? Not many, I guess) will render the world – and not a country – even more pregnant with terror and terrorism and terror and terrorism ...
Art – sorry … – but I can't really help. I don't want to draw any comparison with terrorism. I keep repeating myself even if many sentences that characterize terrorism could probably also be found in past, present and future visions on art and artist.
Please, don’t let me make sense and sentences on "the vision of a future art". Please, let us not make war. Let's talk about failing and art, impotence and art, daily life and art, frustration and art, business and art. I have to stop writing now, I guess. "The show must go on".
Rainer Ganahl, New York, September 24, 2025 |
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